Your work on Inheritance and Performance is very stimulating. Keep the comments coming. I will comment over the weekend.
One thing to remember, in our volatile age, is that the kinds of emotions that Hemans releases in her poems, while very much central to the discourses of entertainment in our own culture, are disruptive and upsetting. They sometimes emerge from fear, desperation, anger,the threat of or actualization of trauma, but they also emerge from other forms of strong feeling like devotion, love and its complex attachments, fidelity, allegiance, etc. All of these emotions and the effect they have on the way we perform ourselves are complex, and as a culture I am not sure that we are very good at engaging in the kinds of regulation that help people to manage the effects of strong emotion. Resentment, on of the most corrosive emotions other than jealousy, is often left unchecked and untreated, and this can create serious problems for people in their domestic lives. professional lives, and (although less so in this country than in others) their political lives. I'll leave responses to that thought open to you, and I welcome your comments (of any kind!).
I mention this because we are beginning a novel of regulation, MansfieldPark, and for those of you who have not yet read the novel, the pace might be a little slow. Should you become frustrated, remember that as academics we spend a lot of time reading and that reading is an important form of emotional and imaginative regulation that affects our domestic situations in important ways.
One of the central differences between Romanticism and 18th century poetry (I'll leave the 18th century novel -- with its dramas of virtue, honour, public performance in the private sphere,corruption, and titillation -- out of the picture for a moment) is that it created room for peopling what Samuel Taylor Coleridge calls in "Frost at Midnight," "the interspersed vacancies of thought." The idea that the imagination could bring us closer to people, could transform our relations with one another, and could actually "people the world" differently through the experience (imaginative though it was) of freedom, was Romanticism's transformative legacy to the world. This was particularly important for British women writers, since the relationship between home and nation changed profoundly as a result of Romantic thought about the imagination :) A woman, girl, man, or boy of any age, could engage in the spirited attachment to far off places. A growing body of literate people could connect home and nation and see the home as an extension or even revision of the nation. By responding to rapidly changing political and class formations, Romantic women writers were at the vanguard of the transition away from the last gasps of feudalism that the many debates in Parliament, in newspapers, in journals (public and private) that literate people could follow and consider. Hemans writes to that moment; she creates it as a lived experience that is both emotional and intellectual. Her enthusiasm is part of her curiosity, and she uses powerful emotions to make specific scenes from history memorable.
One question for us is "what do we do with those powerful emotions?" How do they help us reimagine the world? What kind of moral web or map do they create for us as we learn far more history than we learned in school ...?
One last thought -- The intractability of poverty was a significant concern in such an optimistic age, and while some Romantic writers, especially de Stael, William Wordsworth and William Blake focused on poverty in physical and imaginative terms, others like Hemans directed their attention to spiritual poverty and plenitude. This will be of concern to us next week.
When we begin MansfieldPark, for example, we will look carefully at the idea of "improvement" that underlines Mrs. Norris's and Lord Bertram's decision to foster Fanny at MansfieldPark.
On Thursday and in Week 4 when we consider Victorian responses to and reflections on Romanticism, we will be able to get a clearer sense of how the Victorian period represented an extension of, not a rebellion against or repudiation of, some of the major forms of public identity for women that we saw in Corinne.
Hi everyone --
Your work as a class has been excellent -- enlivening, creative, informative and very, very productive.
Because we have been focusing a great deal on ways of reading (and on what reading can be for), you might find that
you are missing a sense of definitive fact (or even definitive points of view). For example, some of you most likely won't have a sense
of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, even though Frankenstein is set at the beginning of this period and Corinne is set right in
the middle. Even if you did have a "read" on these events before taking this class, you probably are a bit at sea, especially after I
praised the British practice of paying tradespeople for goods during the Napoleonic wars (and, even praised Wellington, who for years
I regarded as the devil incarnate, and still do to an extent).
To be honest, I have found that the conventional "Romantic" view of the politics of the French Revolution (expressed most fully in Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage) unhelpful and misleading. To all of the writers whose works we will study, the aftermath of the French Revolution, which saw autocratic monarchies instated in much of Europe and an increase in the persecutions of subjects in the Ottoman Empire, was a disaster. On that, I think we can agree. But it was not a disaster for the United Kingdom, which became increasingly interested in emancipation of various kinds.
It is fashionable in academic circles to criticize Great Britain and to denigrate writers during the Romantic period for their politics (Spivak's essay on Wordsworth is a case in point, if any of you have read that). It is also fashionable in other circles to respond to such criticism with uncritical expressions of nationalism or patriotism.
I'd rather resist both fashions and have us all consider carefully the assumptions we make when we read literature. What makes us comfortable? What makes us uncomfortable? Why? Since domesticity has been associated with various forms of reactionary patriotism over the last 20 or so years, how might we unlearn these associations? How, in other words, might we consider ways of reading that extend, resist, or complicate the first major work on Felicia Hemans, Trisha Lootens'
"Hemans and Home: Victorianism, Feminine 'Internal Enemies,' and the Domestication of National Identity." PMLA 109 (March 1994): 238-53
Or to a poem I gave you on the first day of classes, which we will discuss next week, Hemans's "Corinne at the Capitol"?
Or, given the generally allergic reaction to discourses of domesticity in academia, how can we rethink definitions of the domestic that enable us to read texts by women writers that might otherwise cause us to break out in hives. In some respects, given the way we all have probably organized our own homes around acts of reading and writing, an allergic reaction to domesticity is completely appropriate. But in other respects, reactions to and for domesticity are so politically over determined that volumes upon volumes of books that should be read are not read.
So, one question for us to consider as we think about inheritance in Corinne, or Italy and in Hemans's poetry is:
What literary critical traditions, what social factors, what professional kinds of acculturation, what personal factors and inheritances limit our reading practices and habits? To make the question shorter -- what factors related to our own literary and professional histories prevent us from reading a wider variety of texts?
We all know that electronic gadgets like the one I am writing on now limit us in significant and perhaps irrevocably damaging ways
But I wonder what other factors are at work, especially if we consider reading and writing about creativity, which is what you are doing this weekend, to be a major aspect of creativity in our lines of work.
Hello everyone --
Your work on Inheritance and Performance is very stimulating. Keep the comments coming. I will comment over the weekend.
One thing to remember, in our volatile age, is that the kinds of emotions that Hemans releases in her poems, while very much central to the discourses of entertainment in our own culture, are disruptive and upsetting. They sometimes emerge from fear, desperation, anger,the threat of or actualization of trauma, but they also emerge from other forms of strong feeling like devotion, love and its complex attachments, fidelity, allegiance, etc. All of these emotions and the effect they have on the way we perform ourselves are complex, and as a culture I am not sure that
we are very good at engaging in the kinds of regulation that help people to manage the effects of strong emotion. Resentment, on of the most corrosive emotions other than jealousy, is often left unchecked and untreated, and this can create serious problems for people in their domestic lives. professional lives, and (although less so in this country than in others) their political lives. I'll leave responses to that thought open to you, and I welcome your comments (of any kind!).
I mention this because we are beginning a novel of regulation, MansfieldPark, and for those of you who have not yet read the novel, the pace might be a little slow. Should you become frustrated, remember that as academics we spend a lot of time reading and that reading is an important form of emotional and imaginative regulation that affects our domestic situations in important ways.
One of the central differences between Romanticism and 18th century poetry (I'll leave the 18th century novel -- with its dramas of virtue, honour, public performance in the private sphere,corruption, and titillation -- out of the picture for a moment) is that it created room for peopling what Samuel Taylor Coleridge calls in "Frost at Midnight," "the interspersed vacancies of thought." The idea that the imagination could bring us closer to people, could transform our relations with one another, and could actually "people the world" differently through the experience (imaginative though it was) of freedom, was Romanticism's transformative legacy to the world. This was particularly important for British women writers, since the relationship between home and nation changed profoundly as a result of Romantic thought about the imagination :) A woman, girl, man, or boy of any age, could engage in the spirited attachment to far off places. A growing body of literate people could connect home and nation and see the home as an extension or even revision of the nation. By responding to rapidly changing political and class formations, Romantic women writers were at the vanguard of the transition away from the last gasps of feudalism that the many debates in Parliament, in newspapers, in journals (public and private) that literate people could follow and consider. Hemans writes to that moment; she creates it as a lived experience that is both emotional and intellectual. Her enthusiasm is part of her curiosity, and she uses powerful emotions to make specific scenes from history memorable.
One question for us is "what do we do with those powerful emotions?" How do they help us reimagine the world? What kind of moral web or map do they create for us as we learn far more history than we learned in school ...?
One last thought -- The intractability of poverty was a significant concern in such an optimistic age, and while some Romantic writers, especially de Stael, William Wordsworth and William Blake focused on poverty in physical and imaginative terms, others like Hemans directed their attention to spiritual poverty and plenitude. This will be of concern to us next week.
When we begin MansfieldPark, for example, we will look carefully at the idea of "improvement" that underlines Mrs. Norris's and Lord Bertram's decision to foster Fanny at MansfieldPark.
On Thursday and in Week 4 when we consider Victorian responses to and reflections on Romanticism, we will be able to get a clearer sense of how the Victorian period represented an extension of, not a rebellion against or repudiation of, some of the major forms of public identity for women that we saw in Corinne.
Hi everyone --
Your work as a class has been excellent -- enlivening, creative, informative and very, very productive.
Because we have been focusing a great deal on ways of reading (and on what reading can be for), you might find that
you are missing a sense of definitive fact (or even definitive points of view). For example, some of you most likely won't have a sense
of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, even though Frankenstein is set at the beginning of this period and Corinne is set right in
the middle. Even if you did have a "read" on these events before taking this class, you probably are a bit at sea, especially after I
praised the British practice of paying tradespeople for goods during the Napoleonic wars (and, even praised Wellington, who for years
I regarded as the devil incarnate, and still do to an extent).
To be honest, I have found that the conventional "Romantic" view of the politics of the French Revolution (expressed most fully in Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage) unhelpful and misleading. To all of the writers whose works we will study, the aftermath of the French Revolution, which saw autocratic monarchies instated in much of Europe and an increase in the persecutions of subjects in the Ottoman Empire, was a disaster. On that, I think we can agree. But it was not a disaster for the United Kingdom, which became increasingly interested in emancipation of various kinds.
It is fashionable in academic circles to criticize Great Britain and to denigrate writers during the Romantic period for their politics (Spivak's essay on Wordsworth is a case in point, if any of you have read that). It is also fashionable in other circles to respond to such criticism with uncritical expressions of nationalism or patriotism.
I'd rather resist both fashions and have us all consider carefully the assumptions we make when we read literature. What makes us comfortable? What makes us uncomfortable? Why? Since domesticity has been associated with various forms of reactionary patriotism over the last 20 or so years, how might we unlearn these associations? How, in other words, might we consider ways of reading that extend, resist, or complicate the first major work on Felicia Hemans, Trisha Lootens'
"Hemans and Home: Victorianism, Feminine 'Internal Enemies,' and the Domestication of National Identity." PMLA 109 (March 1994): 238-53
Or to a poem I gave you on the first day of classes, which we will discuss next week, Hemans's "Corinne at the Capitol"?
Or, given the generally allergic reaction to discourses of domesticity in academia, how can we rethink definitions of the domestic that enable us to read texts by women writers that might otherwise cause us to break out in hives. In some respects, given the way we all have probably organized our own homes around acts of reading and writing, an allergic reaction to domesticity is completely appropriate. But in other respects, reactions to and for domesticity are so politically over determined that volumes upon volumes of books that should be read are not read.
So, one question for us to consider as we think about inheritance in Corinne, or Italy and in Hemans's poetry is:
What literary critical traditions, what social factors, what professional kinds of acculturation, what personal factors and inheritances limit our reading practices and habits? To make the question shorter -- what factors related to our own literary and professional histories prevent us from reading a wider variety of texts?
We all know that electronic gadgets like the one I am writing on now limit us in significant and perhaps irrevocably damaging ways
But I wonder what other factors are at work, especially if we consider reading and writing about creativity, which is what you are doing this weekend, to be a major aspect of creativity in our lines of work.
Good luck with your essays.
I hope everyone can read this!!
Dr. Williamson